Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
light to impede progress.There is, perhaps, no city in the world offering so
much beauty for those going to work.”
48
During the 1920s and the 1930s, parkway development seemed like
an ideal means of combining recreation, natural resource protection, and
transportation. Buoyed by the examples of Rock Creek Parkway,
Potomac Parkway, and Mount Vernon Memorial Highway, which afforded
an attractive tree-lined route from Washington to Mount Vernon when
completed in 1932, planners proposed an ambitious parkway development
program for the Washington area. George Washington Memorial Parkway
would cover both sides of the Potomac between Mount Vernon and Great
Falls, while the C&O Canal Parkway would follow the old canal bed all the
way from Georgetown to Cumberland. Other parkways would preserve
and rehabilitate threatened stream valleys, provide recreational opportuni-
ties, and service commuters and real estate development throughout the
capital region.
49
Even as these expansive plans were being prepared, however, a combina-
tion of social and technological factors made it increasingly apparent that
the competing functions of “park” and “way” could no longer be accom-
modated in single, multi-purpose environments. Rising speeds and traffic
volumes spurred demands for wider, straighter, and more efficient trans-
portation corridors. At the same time, park advocates placed increasing
emphasis on preserving natural areas as ecological reserves with a minimum
of extraneous development. Park road and parkway development was
increasingly viewed as incompatible with the ascendant ideology of natural
resource preservation. As suburban development reduced the amount of
open space surrounding the nation's capital while dramatically increasing
commuter traffic, supporters of these conflicting agendas transformed
Washington's parks into battle zones, waging protracted campaigns for
supremacy that raged throughout the 1940s, the 1950s, and the 1960s and
have not entirely disappeared.
Conflicts came to a head when highway engineers sought to accommo-
date rising traffic demands by routing expressways through existing parks
and upgrading parkways into high-speed “freeways.” From the highway
engineers' perspective, parks were not “nature” but vacant space—and
vacant space that was already owned by public authorities and thus exempt
from the prolonged and politically charged condemnation procedures that
accompanied freeway construction in residential neighborhoods. Traffic
planners prepared detailed studies enumerating the ways in which Wash-
